#220 Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. It was over. A strangely disappointing anticlimax to a life that had spanned most of the history of motorsports.
His health had been in severe decline for months and the end had been expected. While his mind remained quick to the last, the powerful body had long since crumbled under the sheer weight of years.
Editorial writers around the world groped for words to express what Enzo Ferrari had meant. Many tried to describe him as an automotive pioneer, which he was not. Others called him a great racing driver and engineer, which he was not. He was exactly what he had repeatedly said he was, an agitator of men. And he remained true to his credo to the day he died.
If there was one essential quality about the man, it was his iron bound tenacity, his fierce devotion to the single cause of winning automobile races with cars bearing his name.
From 1930 onward, for nearly 60 years, hardly a day passed when this thought was not foremost in his mind.
Win or lose, he unfailingly answered the bell.
In that sense, his devotion to his own self-described mission was without precedent, at least within the world of motorsports. For that alone, he towered over his peers.
Enzo Ferrari, the last of the great automotive titans, was gone, never to be replaced.
That was an excerpt about the death of Enzo Ferrari, and it comes from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Enzo Ferrari, The Man and the Machine, written by Brock Yates. And I wanted to start there because this is the third podcast that I've done on Enzo Ferrari. The first two, in case you haven't gone back and listen to them, it's Founders No. 97 It's based on that book, Go Like Hell, which is the story about Ford versus Ferrari. And No. 98 is the biography. Actually, No. 98 is the longest biography I've ever read from the podcast. If you don't include the book of all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters, that biography of Enzo Ferrari is almost a thousand pages long. That's Enzo Ferrari, Power Politics and the Making of an Automotive Empire. And the reason I wanted to do another book on Enzo, and he's one of my favorite founders and entrepreneurs that I've come across since doing this podcast, is because one of the sentences that the author just wrote here, from 1930 onward, for nearly 60 years, hardly a day passed, when this thought was not the foremost in his mind, and that's the thought of his fierce devotion to the single cause of winning automobile races with cars bearing his name. So anytime I have the opportunity to learn from somebody that did the same thing, that was singularly, singularly, I can't even pronounce that word. I don't know if I'm talking funny, but I just had dental work done, so my jaw is still, if I do sound funny too, it's just because my jaw is still swollen.
But the reason I think that's so interesting is because it's just very rare for somebody to be completely obsessed with the same thing and work on the same thing for nearly six decades.
And I think what Enzo Ferrari understood is the same thing that Charlie Munger has talked about, Warren Buffett. It's this trait that a lot of the people, a lot of the entrepreneurs that we study on this podcast know, and it's the fact that knowledge compounds. And if you stay focused on the same thing, keep learning about the same thing for multiple decades, never interrupt the compounding. You're going to have a unique set of knowledge that no one else does. And that's why I think also the author says he towered over his peers. He was the last of the great automotive titans. And when he's dead, he was never to be replaced again. So I want to go to the beginning of the book. I want to introduce you to this guy named Luigi Cinetti. Actually, you know what? Before I do that, I've been getting a lot of messages about gift subscriptions, especially for this time of the year. I recently just switched to a different provider that has more complete feature set for subscription podcasting. But so there's a link in the show notes that you'll find down below. If you click that link, then go in the upper right hand corner, you'll say gift a subscription, and then it gives you a very simple set of instructions on how to do that if you want to. And you can give a monthly subscription or lifetime subscription if you want to. If you're interested in a lifetime subscription, jump on that, though. On January 1st, the price is going to go way up. For the last few months, I've been running this experiment. It's been very popular, but it's definitely not sustainable. But I do want to give you a few more weeks to take advantage of that.